Chris Vance Rises, Glenn Close-like, from the Bathtub of Life!

In September, 2008, we published an article, The Deceptive Comfort of Uncertainty, about a comment to the Reagan Wing that was outstanding for its foolishness, and we talked then about the delicious irony of people who betray irrational hatred while accusing us of hate, who demonstrate great ignorance while accusing us of a lack of knowledge. The commenter of “Uncertainty” had absolute knowledge that nothing could be absolutely known.

We just got another such comment, this one by former WSRP Chair, Chris Vance, that provides much the same level of amusement. With all due respect, of course.

Despite his growing personal irrelevance to the Party he once chaired (’til his self-inflicted resignation of Jan. 2006), Vance has repeatedly been used as a touchstone of quotations for the liberal media. Like Colin Powell and John McCain (nationally), he’s the kind of Republican they like to keep resuscitating. (If Vance is “conservative” then look how “moderate” their commies look!) So he has assumed the tenacity of the undead, like a ghost that cannot leave earth til it has paid for its crimes. And, like the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction, he continues to exact retribution on the Party for its indiscretion. He keeps coming back, refusing to be ignored. Too bad the GOP slept with him.

(Be sure to watch the video to its conclusion)

Vance is exercised about our comments, yesterday, <here> about his 2004 “REVOTE WA” campaign (to try to get Democrats to voluntarily shoot themselves in the head, politically, by the sheer enthusiasm for the project by Republicans.) I said Vance was just doing it to grandstand to get re-elected.

Chris took great exception to the accusation of having that political ambition and wrote the following in comment on the article:

As usual, Doug, your revisionist history is completely inaccurate.

The objective of the WSRP and the Rossi campaign was a new election. We didn’t ask the judiciary to make Dino Governor, we were asking for a new election.

The public campaign was launched to support the legal strategy and had nothing to do with WSRP elections.

Your willingness to blatantly…..fabricate…..continues to amaze me.

I once offered Mr. Vance a wager of $10,000 that I could PROVE a claim he had been making publicly was a lie. Vance’s lie was part of his “Big Tent” drive to destroy the 2004 Senatorial Candidacy of former long-time King County GOP Chair and Seattle Pacific Political Science Professor, Dr. Reed Davis (too conservative) through fabrications and censorship. Vance had been claiming that no one but Reed had ever refused to sign Vance’s Candidate Censorship Agreement. Challenged, he retreated to “no one during my tenure as State Chair.” But I knew he was making it up, like almost everything else he said during that campaign of Republican candidate destruction (leading directly to a flaming GOP defeat in the Senate Race that year, as well as in the State House and Senate and US Congressional seats and most statewide offices and sending Washington’s electors to vote for John Kerry).

So I publicly challenged him to the $10,000 bet.

What do you think happened?–What usually happened when anyone expected a rational outcome from Vance –

Nothing. He would not respond.

Now he returns to the Reagan Wing with new fabrications about “fabrication” … and gloriously… as if his mission was to demonstrate my claims of his forked tongue-ed-ness… ties himself in knots.

Vance’s comment begins with a Yogi Berra-ism. The great Yankee catcher was famous for the creative word-bungle. He once said of a restaurant, for instance, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” But one gets the sense that Vance, unlike Yogi, is not consciously offering it as humor.

“your revisionist history is completely inaccurate”

Given that the purpose of revising history is to be untruthful, I’m gratified that Vance has exonerated me. “Inaccurate” revisionist history, though difficult, by definition has to be truth!

He then confirms that, as I said, the objective of the “REVOTE WA!” campaign was not to get the legislature to crown Rossi, but to get a new election. (Thus, as I also pointed out, removing Christine Gregoire’s—fraudulent—“victory.”) Vance says this with a stridency that suggests he hasn’t noticed he is repeating me.

And he ends with an incredible claim. It is, though he doesn’t point it out, that the ONLY thing he ever actually accomplished by pouring millions of Republican Party dollars into “Revote WA!” and the Rossi lawsuit, and putting Rossi staff on the WSRP payroll, the Rossi endorsement of Vance’s re-election that makes no sense in any other light, was never intended.

In the process, Vance created a mound of unfunded liability for the Party. Luke Esser pointed out in the State Chair debate last month that when he took over, even two chairs later, the Party was still in debt because of it. But it got Vance the one thing he needed.

The thing he needed to overcome his legacy of liberalism, legal license, and looseness with the truth: the (apparently expensive) endorsement of Dino Rossi. State Committee people who were NOT, at the time, Vance supporters deferred to Dino, held their nose, and re-elected Chris.

2 Responses

Together, the WSRP and the Rossi campaign decided to go to court in order to have the election set aside and a new election held. Our legal team said that was a realistic scenario.TRW: Not at issue. But… how was your “legal team” assessed? Was the State Committee apprised that Tebelius, for instance, would be making six figures in the deal? What was the exact wording of the motion? When was the vote? Is the discussion available on tape?

We spent a lot of money on lawyers. We spent a lot of time working to influence public opinion.TRW: The public REVOTE campaign is at issue. At the time you were not ambiguous about the attempt to get the legislature to act. Are you attempting to claim, now, that REVOTE was designed, instead, as exparte communication with the Judge?

We lost in court.
TRW: I have not, so far, addressed your personal culpability for that.

Dino chose not to pursue an appeal.TRW: So What? Was it his money? Was this done for Dino or the Party? And what about PRINCIPLE? The net result on public opinion is that the election was not only lost but appears Judicially confirmed!! Were the Constitutional issue foundations for an appeal properly laid in the court proceedings? Why wasn’t Dino’s lack of dedication to the cause assessed prior to embarking on that course? Was the State Committee, when “they decided to go to court” apprised of Dino’s probable fickleness? On what basis was Fredi Simpson virtually guaranteeing victory? What were the projections of cost made to the State Committee?

We raised the money to completely pay off the debt before I left the Chairmanship.TRW: Are you saying Luke Esser and Diane Tebelius are liars?
I do not know if you are merely lying or also doing creative accounting. That the actual accounting of the Party is kept secret, particularly from the State Committee, is not a secret. That it was kept secret from the treasurer is not widely known, but that may come out.

I was Chairman during the 2002 and 2004 cycles.TRW: Agreed, stipulated, irrelevant.

In 2002 we won the majority in the State Senate. In 2004 we lost legislative seats, but won the AG’s race, held on to two open Congressional seats, and won the Governor’s race, only to have it then taken from us in court.
TRW: These sentences are the reason your comment has not been posted. You want to rumble and our time is limited. The overall picture of your won/lost record is what is at issue and needs to be publicized. We appreciate the opportunity, truth be told, to do that. You and your deceptions need to be exposed because they leverage techniques of deception in use by the remaining members of your faction, the traitorous GOP/Left, the most singularly evil political faction in America.
Young and Sotelo, individually and collectively as dishonest as yourself, continue to spin themselves as “winners” simply because they have not yet lost EVERYTHING.
But we just haven’t had the time to address this in a comprehensive, statistical way.

Those are the facts.
TRW: Irrelevant facts and one lie.

As I have said many times, the only reason I waste time here is to prevent your falsehoods from being accepted as truth.TRW: It is precisely the contrary.

I looked up Chris Vance on Wikipedia and found it severely lacking in information. There nothing about his voting record in the legislature, particularly on ESHB 1209 that codified Education Reform and all it’s trappings into law, his participation on the Growth Management Act committee that resulted in all the ugly condos and apartment complexes instead of attractive single family homes, or his achievements as chairman of the WSRP—beyond taking credit for Rob McKenna’s election. The information is really quite a dull read.

Imagine my surprise when I did a search on the wsrp.org website. I entered the name Chis Vance. The Search results were “0″.